


Induction

by perceived_nobility



Series: Iterations [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Character Death, Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 01:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12877635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perceived_nobility/pseuds/perceived_nobility
Summary: Maybe it’s this that first makes him think about bridges.  He pictures a leap as the fitting end to a life spent in one kind of descent or another.Three years that led Loki to the Longfellow Bridge on a night in December. Companion piece to Iterations.





	Induction

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for suicidal ideation & planning.
> 
> Found this in a project file from 2015 & tossed it up as is.

It’s halfway through his senior year of high school.He’s finishing up his college applications and he can tell by the way Freya advises him to major in whatever would make him happy that he’s not getting the company when he graduates.That will belong to Thor or to Baldr—one of the golden sons.It stings a little, he admits: another retraction his family has made, another lie they’ve as good as admitted they’ve been telling him as long as he can remember.The other lie, of course, is that they are his family to begin with.He knows Odin’s pissed about his choices by the way he can’t look Loki in the face anymore—though Loki thinks, charitably, that it may not just be because he wants to major in something as useless as religion and could have more to do with Odin feeling bad about having raised him falsely.This is charitable of him because it assumes that Odin has enough decency to feel guilty about such a thing.

Upon reflection, he’s never liked holidays that much: too many people asking him things they have no right to know and getting angry when he lies.The company dinners were usually better, if only because he knew the board members who ogled him from across plushly-carpeted hotel ballrooms would be replaced within the year. 

This party is one of the worst of the company ones, though.It’s not even for Odin & Sons—it’s being thrown by another firm as a cross-company mixer.Loki’s pretty sure that a well-placed pipe bomb would temporarily cripple the entire American economy, given how many Fortune 500 CEO’s and CFO’s he’s seen here so far.He wonders how easy it would be to get his hands on some ammonium nitrate.

While he mulls it over, he swipes another glass of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray and gulps at it.He’s been here for hours at this point, probably; long, boring hours full of smiling tightly and telling people he’s a self-made millionaire from Norway.He doesn’t know how many people buy it, nor how many recognize him as an Alfadur and nod along in hopes that he’ll one day remember their blind, brown-nosing loyalty and hire them.He doesn’t care.

The hotel is done up in tinsel and glitter; light shatters as it hits cut crystal chandeliers and polished glass Christmas ornaments.A towering pine tree sags under the weight of ribbons and ornaments, propped up by a pile of neatly wrapped packages beneath it.Loki itches to open them, to make a show out of finding them empty, to run screaming through the party that Santa Clause was a lie if only to have an excuse to get outside.

He’s claimed to go to the bathroom at least six times already and he can tell the excuse is wearing thin.He watches the smokers huddling under awnings through the windows and, not for the first time, wishes he could acquire a taste for tobacco.

Thor’s in the corner laughing with a group of boardmembers’ sons, their arms bulging in crisply tailored suits.He’ll be a great face for the company one day: big and blonde and smiling, so affable that nobody in their right mind could imagine him swindling them.The problem, of course, is that he wouldn’t understand a balance sheet even if you could somehow diffuse the information straight into his brain.At least Baldr didn’t nearly fail high school economics.

Loki tosses back the rest of his champagne and sets off to find his other brother.At this point, he’s buzzed enough that he could probably make Baldr think he’s drunker than he is—drunk enough to require sobering up somewhere other than the party.It’s a trick Loki’s pulled before but it hasn’t yet failed him, kind of like how he can always convince Thor he’s somewhere else by throwing his voice.

Baldr’s standing at the edge of the ballroom, leaning against the doorframe.A giant sprig of mistletoe is taped above him, surprisingly tacky given the ostentatiousness of the rest of the decorations.He’s chatting with Nana, a girl Loki knows by name if not affiliation.He thinks he’s seen her hobnobbing with members of some environmental nonprofit or another, but he’s not sure if she works with them or just wants to give them money.What he is sure of is that one day he’s going to come downstairs to find her and Baldr making pancakes together and smiling at each other and he won’t even be surprised.

Exchanging his empty glass of champagne for a full one, Loki winds his way toward Baldr.He crashes into the wall a few feet away, letting his head loll for a moment before swinging it up to look over.Baldr’s watching him over Nana’s head, eyebrows drawn together in concern.Loki sloshes champagne on himself and giggles.He waits, head resting on the wall, while Baldr makes his excuses and hurries over.“Loki, hey.How are you doing?”

Loki jerks off the wall and waves his arms expansively, sloshing more champagne out of the glass.“Fuckin’ _Christmas_ , man.”He hiccups for effect.Baldr runs a hand over his face before plucking the glass out of Loki’s hand.Loki whines at him, making a grab for it as Baldr reaches around him to place it on a fold-out table. 

“No Loki, we’re going home now before you hurt yourself.”Loki makes a show of pouting as Baldr guides him across the lobby and out the doors.The air is bitingly cold; it slices through the film of alcohol and boredom around Loki’s brain and colors are sharper, edges harder.He breathes a sigh of relief, swallowing down the cold to keep as long as possible.

The drive home is snowy and silent.Baldr taps his fingers on the steering wheel and Loki’s not sure if he knows Loki’s faking.But Baldr parks and leads Loki inside and sits him down in the kitchen with a glass of water and the full filter next to him with strict instructions to finish the whole thing by the time the family comes back and Loki smiles to himself as he watches Baldr leave, hunched up against the snow in a way Loki’s never felt the need to be.

The storm gets worse on Baldr’s way back to the party.A truck skids out on the freeway, blocking the onramp.Its trailer is bright white like the snow and Baldr doesn’t see a difference.

Loki pours most of the water in the filter down the drain and makes himself some toast.He doesn’t answer his phone the first time it rings because he figures it’s Odin calling him to yell about the fact that he bailed on the party.He doesn’t answer the second time because he thinks it’s Freya asking him how he is and if he’s drinking water.

He answers the third time because it’s Odin and there’s no way Odin would call him twice.

 

The next two years feel like one long, endless winter.Frost melts and flowers bloom but there’s a chill in Loki’s chest that won’t go away.He coughs sometimes, trying to dislodge it, but it stays.

He graduates high school and works for a summer doing clerical duties around corporate headquarters.He watches Thor receiving the training that Baldr would have had and quietly corrects Thor’s accounts sheets before he turns them in.One day he can’t stand it anymore and he actually lets Thor make some trades with a shell corporation Loki sets up and then bankrupts.Not a lot of money is lost, on his part or Thor’s.But when he marches up to Odin’s office, balance sheets in hand, and shows Odin how Thor’s plans will bring down the company but his—which rely on the kind of fast trading and slick negotiation with foreign banks Odin had told him about growing up—will raise their net worth twofold and Odin levels him with a stare across his desk and utters two words.“No, Loki.”And Loki leaves, changes his last name before his college ID is printed and moves himself out to BU alone.Sometimes he thinks he started falling that summer—or maybe earlier, when he convinced Baldr to drive him home or when he first spotted him under that sprig of mistletoe—and that he hasn’t stopped since.

Maybe it’s this that first makes him think about bridges.He pictures a leap as the fitting end to a life spent in one kind of descent or another.

At least this way, he will eventually stop.

He passes his first year of college and takes an internship in the school library, cataloguing all the dusty books that nobody checks out anymore and disinfecting the public computers twice a day.He barely talks to anyone, barely sees anyone in the stacks and ignores the raucous shouts of visiting high schoolers enrolled in pre-college research courses. 

Fall comes again and the chill within Loki is matched by the chill without.He shivers his way to classes and sits, barely taking notes, breathing on his fingers and snapping them to make sure they’re not numb.His classmates stare at him when he does this, so he takes to sitting in the back of class.Then he takes to not coming into class except on exam days.His grades drop but he’s the only one who knows.He loses his merit scholarships and takes out loans to cover the difference.He gets a paying job at the library and works all the hours he can.

The financial bubble stays burst and his classmates leave class to march on Wall St: they take planes to DC to picket in Central Park and in front of the White House and it’s the saddest, smallest revolution Loki’s ever seen but he desperately wants them to win.Odin is on the news; Thor is, too: the whole family put on display as a prime example of America’s economic royalty, at once worshipped and despised by the common man.It gives Loki a grim satisfaction that Odin can’t manage to fully talk his way out of public hate, no matter what exceptions the government makes.

Another summer passes, this one emptier than the last.As the days warm, it gets harder to make himself get up in the morning.He doesn’t want to see his family name plastered on the headlines, swiped quickly by him as he waits in line for coffee.Even sleep abandons him, taunting him with dreams of snow so thick he can’t see through it and the frozen body of his brother splayed out on the road.He loses his job at the library when he shouts down a couple who’d stumbled into the Chinese archives to fuck: he chases them out of the building, screaming at them until his throat hurts.The boy has dark hair like Baldr and the girl clutches an environmental science textbook to her chest.Loki goes home after his shift—his last shift—and stares at his knife block until he realizes that that would be unnecessarily messy.

He decides he doesn’t want to be messy.

He starts to pack his things that night into neat cardboard boxes that Goodwill provides for free.Clothes in one, books in another, kitchenware in a third.He burns all the pictures he still has of his family—they’re few, all stuffed into the backs of old notebooks he’d forgotten about, which is why he still has them at all.The school year arrives sometime in the middle of all this, and he’s actually distracted enough to go to class a few times.He manages to write papers in the anonymity of downtown coffee shops and bookstores; after receiving a particularly good grade he even tries unpacking one of the boxes, but the chill seeps out into his fingers and he can’t breathe because maybe he can do this now but he can’t even fathom the idea of _continuing_ and he’s recognized for a long time that his play under the mistletoe has set bigger events in motion and it is his job to pack and to prepare and to pay penance for what he has done.

He forges a letter of acceptance from a German school to give him an excuse to withdraw from classes after fall semester and on the last day of finals, he stops by the bridge on his way home.He waits there all night, getting a feeling for the traffic patterns and the timing of police patrols.He contacts his landlord, telling him he won’t renew his lease for the new year.He brings the last of the boxes to Goodwill on the first Thursday of winter break, makes sure everything is gone from his apartment.He arms himself as if in a trance: wallet, student ID, passport, birth certificate all slid into pockets.He thinks of wearing his suit and dress shoes—he kept them for this purpose—but in the end settles for more casual clothes.The suit doesn’t fit him well anymore and he hasn’t worn it since he changed his name.So he takes it with him, wrapped in a garment bag, and leaves it on the stoop of a building in the financial district like an offering.


End file.
